Published on the 16/03/2022 | Written by Heather Wright

It’s time to rethink outdated assumptions…

IT workers are among the most likely to quit globally – with Australian and Kiwi employees among those most likely to do so, according to a new Gartner survey, with the analyst firm calling for a more data-driven, human-centric approach to retaining talent.

IT skills shortages, and the need to retain the hotly contested talent already available in market, have been a dominant theme for most Australian and New Zealand companies in the past 18 months. Australia and New Zealand haven’t been spared from the Great Resignation, so it’s no surprise that employees might keeping their eyes open for new opportunities.

“While talent retention is a common C-level concern, CIO’s are at the epicentre.”

What might, however, surprise some CIOs is just how many of their employees could be eyeing greener pastures.

The Gartner report shows only 29.1 percent of IT workers globally have ‘high intent to stay’ with their current employer. For Australia and New Zealand, that number’s even lower, at just 23.6 percent. 

Globally, IT workers have a 10.2 percent lower intent to stay than non-IT employees – the lowest out of all corporate functions, Gartner says. 

IT workers under the age of 30 are two-and-a-half times less likely to stay than those over 50. 

While money may have been a key deciding factor only a few years ago, Gartner says another survey shows 65 percent of IT employees say whether they can work flexibly impacts their decision to stay with an organisation. 

Graham Waller, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, says while talent retention is a common C-level concern, CIO’s are at the epicentre.

“We’ve heard of IT organisations implementing back-to-the-office policies only to face mass resignations and have to reverse course,” Waller says.

“CIOs may need to advocate for more flexibility in work design than the rest of the enterprise, as IT employees are more likely to leave, in greater demand and more adept at remote working than most other employees.”

Earlier this month, Gartner distinguished VP analyst Andy Rowsell-Jones warned that while local companies are pumping extra funds into IT this year – a 3.1 percent IT budget increase across A/NZ –  much of that money will be going to ‘wage inflation’ as companies desperately seek talent amid a crushing talent shortage.

Waller is advocating for CIOs to use a data-driven approach to identify workers who are most at risk and most valuable, and tailor hybrid work policies to keep them engaged and high-performing. 

And while Forrester was pushing a future of human-centred technology earlier this year, including reimagined HCM platforms more akin to targeted CRM platforms, Gartner is going more low-tech, pushing a human-centric work model.

It’s a model which requires CIOs to rethink outdated assumptions, and metrics, about work, including working hours – including the potential of new schedules such as four-day weeks – the need to be in an office, and the need for meetings. 

“The culture of meetings started in the 1950s when people had to come together physically to make decisions,” Gartner notes. “Now, asynchronous and synchronous collaboration tools enable distributed decision making, collaboration and creativity.”

A key complaint for many workers who have gone remote since Covid has been the overabundance of online meetings – leading to the rise of video fatigue, or being ‘zoomed out’. It’s just one example of an old office-centric way of working being ‘virtualised’, rather than a modern approach being created. 

“CIOs who adopt a human-centric work design will out-hire, out-retain and out-perform those that revert back to industrial-era work paradigms,” Waller says.

Rowsell-Jones, speaking at a composability webinar earlier this month, noted the need for companies to consider tapping more into the ‘business technologists’ within their organisation. These are employees who report outside of the IT department but create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external use. And it’s a big category, according to Rowsell-Jones – some 41 percent of all technology workers. Just 10 percent are IT staff.

“If you are thinking about how to build a business composable organisation, most of the talent, the capability building, is going to come from the business technologists,” Rowsell-Jones says. 

“Guys in IT are important but there is an awful lot of talent out there and we have to figure out in building business composable models how we tap into that talent.”